Alabama stormwater management dispute settlement OK'd

Storm runoff on Oakwood Avenue in Huntsville during a January storm. (The Huntsville Times/Michael Mercier)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- A settlement approved Friday in Montgomery by the Environmental Management Commission ends a long-running dispute over how state and local governments are supposed to carry out programs to prevent water pollution.

The federal Clean Water Act requires municipalities to keep their systems of storm water collection and disposal from becoming conduits for pollution, whether that be chemicals dumped in sewers or sediment from construction sites washing into streets and making its way into streams.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which is responsible for enforcing the Clean Water Act in the state, issues permits to cities detailing their responsibilities and procedures.

When ADEM proposed a new version of the permits for small cities, the Birmingham-based Business Alliance for Responsible Development and other development interests lodged a number of objections. A revised version brought objections from environmental groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and another revision drew a lawsuit from BARD and a handful of local governments.

The suit contended that the heightened responsibilities being put on small municipalities for policing storm water were too much of a burden and would result in duplicate layers of regulation for developers.

The settlement specifies that projects by utilities regulated by the Public Service Commission, primarily power lines and gas pipelines, would not be subject to regulation by individual municipalities they pass through, said Gil Rogers, senior attorney with Southern Environmental Law Center. Instead, they will continue to be governed by other state and federal permits.

Stephen Bradley, a spokesman for BARD, said the settlement was a matter of moving on.

"ADEM, the business community and cities have been discussing this issue for a long time. I think the settlement agreement was just a realization by all parties that some agreement needed to be reached on those issues and hence the settlement," Bradley said.

Rogers said the environmental groups he represents did not sign off on the settlement but did withdraw their objections. While environmental groups consider removing the utility projects from local monitoring a weakening of the permit, they were more interested in seeing the new permit go into effect, he said.

"The settlement does represent a rollback, but the permit does remain essentially intact," Rogers said.